9/30/2010 @ 9:37PM3,085 views

A China Watcher's Observations On India

Instead of joining the crowds attending the Shanghai Expo, I spent much of my summer preparing to serve as a chaperone for a group of college students traveling to India earlier this month on a two-week study tour. I had jumped at the opportunity to join them, not only because I’ve enjoyed playing a similar role on student trips in the past (though I have, and this time was just as rewarding), but also because the India-China relationship is an increasingly prominent (and increasingly clichéd) topic in the news these days and I felt that, with no firsthand exposure to India, I only knew half the story.

Two weeks certainly isn’t long enough to develop any sort of expertise on a country, let alone one as large as India. So what follows isn’t a definitive essay on the state of India-China relations or economic issues, simply a few observations by someone who ordinarily focuses on the China side of the equation. My research methods involved staring out our bus window for hours on end as we drove from New Delhi through northern India, chatting with café and restaurant owners during our stops, and buying an English-language newspaper every day or two to see what issues made it into the press. If I’ve misread or over-simplified something, please leave a comment—I’d like to improve my understanding of things wherever possible.

As a place to begin, here are two China-India topics that I pondered during our trip:

• Roads: Driving in India, as in China, is not for the faint of heart. The reasons, however, are different: while in China my fright stemmed from high speeds and the creative maneuvers many drivers employed to beat traffic, in India the primary reason for my concern was the generally poor quality of the roads. I was surprised to see massive craters (“potholes” really doesn’t convey the scale accurately) marring the streets of Delhi, which quickly filled with rainwater during the frequent monsoon storms hitting the city. And even the largest highways we traveled were never more than two lanes, in marked contrast to the California-like freeways being built in China these days.

It is possible, though, that were I to return to India in a year or two I would travel on very different surfaces: road development and improvement forms the cornerstone of a plan for beefing up India’s infrastructure announced earlier this year (and some of that roadwork, it seems, might be accomplished with Chinese money). Hoping to reach a target of 47,000 kilometers of highway constructed or repaired by 2015, Indian laborers are encouraged to work at a pace of 20 kilometers per day. It’s an ambitious plan, and I did encounter much evidence of its execution—at several points our bus was diverted from the main highway and forced to detour around construction sites. But building 20 km per day of new roads might not be fast enough: with auto sales in India surging to new heights this year, the country is on track to be the world’s number three car market in the next decade, after China and the United States. Traffic in Delhi never moved faster than a steady crawl during my time in the city; let’s hope Chinese-level traffic jams aren’t in India’s future.

• Education: Everywhere I looked in India, it seemed, I saw advertisements for higher education. Painted onto the sides of rural brick buildings, posted on billboards along major roads, and adorning fences everywhere were signs urging readers to pursue degrees in computer science, hospitality services, architecture, and management. Other ads targeted a different demographic, offering SAT and GRE prep services for students hoping to test into schools overseas. Even the Buzzy Buddyz Nursery School in Delhi promises parents that it is in the business of “Creating Tiny Geniuses.” It’s certainly not exceptional for education to be such a major concern these days, of course, but the omnipresent advertisements for programs of all sorts still caught my eye.

The China side of my brain was intrigued by a different dimension of the education issue when I picked up the Indian Express on September 10 and read a large article expressing concern over the just-released QS World University Rankings. The article’s first sentence indicated that Indian educators are worried about more than just their overall placement on the list: “Four Chinese universities figure in the list of the world’s best 50 educational institutions, even as India’s sole representative in the top 200—IIT Bombay—has slipped 24 places from its 2009 position.” Of even greater note, “three of the four Chinese universities in the top 50 have improved their positions since last year. At No. 23, the University of Hong Kong is up one place, and on top of the Asian pile. The Chinese University of Hong Kong is up to 42 from 46, and Peking University is up to 47 from 52.” While Indian university official would surely like to improve their positions vis-à-vis American and European schools, right now the chief competition comes from institutions sitting a bit closer to home.

For all the hype about China-India these days, there are still relatively few people who move between the two countries (writers Pallavi Aiyar and Pankaj Mishra are the two I’m most familiar with). The Himalayas seem to serve as both a physical and psychological boundary: there’s clearly a sense that China and India are both sitting somewhere on the same general trajectory of development, but no one has yet decided whether they should be speaking about the two in the context of cooperation or competition. Leaders in both nations appear similarly unsure of whether they should embrace their neighbor or be wary of the other’s growth; for every story of Mandarin classes potentially coming to Indian schools and middle-class Chinese taking up yoga, there’s another about tensions over water rights. But there is a definite understanding that this relationship will be an important one in decades to come, and the more India and China watchers who turn their eyes on the other country, the better.

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